AAT refurbishment and HERMES

The facilities at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) are to be refurbished to assist in maintaining them at a world-class standard for at least the next ten years. In addition, a new instrument for the Anglo-Australian Telescope, providing world-leading scientific capabilities, will be developed, built and installed. The milestones and budget for these two projects are available in the attachments to the AAO NCRIS subcontract.

AAT refurbishment

AAL will pay the AAO $4.1M over four years to refurbish the AAT. The scope of work will include:

• Telescope subsystems;
• Architectural and building works;
• Dome;
• Infrastructure.

HERMES

A new AAT instrument, HERMES, a high-resolution spectrograph fed by the wide-field 2dF fibre system, is under development.

HERMES' primary science driver is Galactic archaeology - the unravelling of the history of the Milky Way by chemically fingerprinting a million stars and reconstructing the formation sequence of the Galaxy.

The cost of HERMES is now estimated as $7.2M, with $5.9M coming from NCRIS and $1.3M coming from the AAO's recurrent funding. The instrument is expected to be handed over for science commissioning by the end of December 2012.